Alex Ross has announced that his current ringtone is John Adams’ Harmonielehre. Excellent choice.
As of a few days ago, mine is an old favorite: Steve Reich’s Music for a Large Ensemble. Before that, and I’ll probably go back soon, it was the announcement jingle heard constantly on Budapest trams and buses.
Check it out:
Now that I think about it… maybe Six Marimbas.
Blue Gobo has an addictive collection of footage from original Broadway productions dating at least as far back as Rogers and Hart’s Jumbo (1935). Most of the footage that interests me is of scenes excerpted on the Ed Sullivan Show in the 50’s and 60’s.
The first one that jumped out at me was this performance of “Cool” with the original cast of West Side Story on Ed Sullivan in 1959 or so. The Jerome Robbins choreography, as I’d seen it in the film version, always seemed kind of goofy to me, but now seeing it on a stage, I can sort of imagine how effective it must have been live in its time.
And speaking of Leonard Bernstein musicals, here’s Carol Channing on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1953 doing “100 Ways to Lose A Man” from the Bernstein/Comden/Green show Wonderful Town. Mainly, I love this for the awkward, contrived setup that Ed concocted. Notice how Carol is barely able to play along.
I enjoy these clips for their historical interest as much as anything else. Here’s the 1968 cast of Hair, again on Ed Sullivan. If you watch to the end, you can see them file into the frightened and bewildered audience, and then attack a frightened and bewildered Ed with flowers.
Many more fascinating original cast excerpts, some fairly obscure, are found at Blue Gobo. My thanks to Charles Gilbert for the discovery.
In researching the last post I came across something that has me howling. A couple of Dutch guys made this loopy music video using a Burt Bacharach song I’d never heard before (from a movie I’ve never heard of before). The song isn’t much to blog about, but video is hilarious.
One of my favorites, the always entertaining The Standing Room, celebrates three years today. If you’re already a follower of TSR and haven’t seen it today, there’s a lovely surprise for you today.
My congratulations to M. C—! You can park in my driveway any time 
Roger Bourland recently linked to a video of the Bulgarian State Women’s Chorus, which reminded me of my latent obsession with Bulgarian folk music. Check it out, (and read the comments for your daily dose of surrealism).
Years ago, during a very short stint as the vocal director of a folk ensemble, I had the pleasure of preparing that first song in the video, which is called “Ergen Deda”. The rhythm of the piece is a fast 7/8 Šopska dance (from the Šop region of Bulgaria; Šopska is also a tasty salad).
These 7/8 dances are so fast that the notion of “7/8″ fails to really capture it. It’s really just a matter of “short-short-long”. In Bulgarian (and Greek and other Balkan) music all kinds of interesting combinations of “short” and “long” are used, and we’re forced to notate them with awkward 11’s and 13’s.
See if you can figure this one out:
You can see why I love this stuff, right? If you listen to the end, it gets faster and becomes increasingly difficult to turn off.
Here’s another one:
There’s even better stuff out there, but I don’t own any. I was able to find these online thanks to this site.
To really appreciate this music, you need to see it danced. Found this for you. If you don’t watch the whole thing, at least let it load and skip to the end. There’s always a wild finish in these presentations.
P.S. - Poking around on YouTube for Bulgarian stuff, I found this travel pitch for Bulgaria, which despite the lady’s weird Bulgaro-Surrey accent has me contemplating summer vacation 2008.
P.P.S. - I managed to sneak a Bulgarian(ish) 7/8 into the coda of Letter To Hungary (try excerpt #2), but it’s all right; sometimes Hungarian music gets into this rhythmic territory.
Joshua Kosman has a pretty funny anecdote about a know-it-all violinist musician. I suppose her ignorance shouldn’t be surprising, given her bad attitude, but…. sheesh!
It’s been a while since I’ve added a new blog to the set of feeds that I monitor regularly, and I almost never add anything new to my “Other Blogs” list (see the flyout menu to the left). Recently I added Red Black Window the blog of composer and Renaissance man Roger Bourland, who may be the most like-minded music blogger I’ve encountered so far.
For one thing, Roger shares my interest in the study or non-”classical” music, and we’ve both been caught analysing 60’s rock, only he’s a lot better at it. Here’s a post I wish I’d written. I wish I had time to piece together exactly what he’s up to, but there are several posts where he appears to be giving composition lessons to Rufus Wainwright, about whose music he is now preparing a book.
I’ve only scratched the surface. Please also take a look at Roger’s “traditional” web site, which is a work of art in itself (you’ll need your Flash plugin in working order). Having spent some time in the “Listening Area” there, I can say that he and I are like-minded aesthetically as well as, uh, bloguetically.
P.S. - Roger and I also share views on botanical-infused spirits.
OK. This is way off-topic, but I haven’t posted for a while, and this is pretty interesting.
Watching America is web site that digests articles from the world press that take a point of view, one way or the other, specifically on American issues. Articles are taken directly from the foreign-language source and translated by volunteers. So, in other words, you can be assured that this material is not sanitized and repackaged for English-speaking readers.
There’s some pretty nail-biting stuff here: An interview with an al-Qaeda leader, interviews with Iraq insurgents, and some very harsh comments from journalists in Europe.
I lived in Hungary during the first Gulf War, and I always found it fascinating how different the coverage was there from what I was getting from CNN, Voice of America and the International Herald Tribute. More recently, I’ve been casually following the Hungarian press out of the same fascination. So guess what: Watching America has accepted me as an occasional translator.
Last week, I translated a few articles from various Hungarian news sources. Surely the most controversial one so far is this one, from the portal site Index.hu. It’s not in the best taste, but it’s sure interesting.
(Don’t worry; I’m still a composer. More about that during the week.)
Well, this San Francisco music blogger doesn’t get to see the John Adams opera Doctor Atomic until a week from tomorrow. I am a big John Adams fan going back to the 80’s, and pretty opinionated about musical theater, so I’m sure I’ll have a thing or two to say about it after that.
I’m taking the kind advice from M.C. of The Standing Room fame to avoid reading too much about it before I see it, but I did read Anthony Tommasini’s review in today’s New York Times, which was tantalizing. So far, it sounds like it’s a landmark work.
If you’re nowhere near San Francisco, or do not have the will power to avoid reviews, Lisa Hirsch offers a handy list of reviews from journalists around the country.
In the Wings also has some lovely comments, give a good idea of what the piece “smells” like, without giving too much away.
There are probably dozens or hundres more out there. Here’s a handy shortcut.
(This is my first attempt at “Trackback”. Am I doing it right?)
This blog was started about a month ago, and I’ve been gradually adding links to my blogroll (see left-side column). Here are a few highlights. (more…)
